Sunday, July 9, 2017

Moscow Continues to Cover Up Mass Murder by Chechen Authorities

Paul
Goble

Staunton, July 9 – Novaya gazeta has made continuing
contributions to exposing the vicious violence of Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime against
its opponents, including gays and anyone whom the Chechen leader views as
getting in his way. Its latest expose of mass murder there in January is only
the latest.

Her article makes for chilling
reading, fully justifying her conclusion that the terrorist regime that Kadyrov
is operating means that “in Chechnya, only the dead no longer have anything to
fear.”But there is an aspect of her
report that may be neglected when, as expected, this story goes viral in the
next few days.

And that is this: in various ways,
officials in Moscow have refused to investigate fully reports of such crimes
and thus behaved in this case as in others involving the Chechen strongman as
authors of a cover up that makes them culpable of Kadyrov’s continuing criminal
behavior.

Sometimes Russian officials started
to investigate only to call it off, Milashina says; and sometimes they simply
ended their exploration of what is going on by suggesting that since “the
victims of crimes themselves have not made declarations, then there wasn’t any
crime” to be investigated, a most Orwellian view.

Given the remarkable dossier that
Novaya gazeta has assembled, this position will be increasingly difficult to
maintain even among a cynical Russian population and will spark more questions
about the Nemtsov murder and others that Moscow has blamed on individual
Chechens but not on the Chechen regime.